I know, I know.  The saying goes “Missing the Forest for the Trees…” or something like that.  But that’s not going on here.  Alot of you people are missing the Forest for the damn stumps.  Case in point, recently a kid demanded that his law school admit to swindling him so he could discharge his loans in bankruptcy.  And yes this story was on ATL.  Why do we quote ATL so much when this blog is supposed to be out all student debtors? Because ATL is about law and has a major black contributor.  Out of the 6.5 bloggers we’ve got two lawyers, a paralegal, a law student and two African-Americans.  This ain’t rocket science.  Link below.

http://abovethelaw.com/2010/07/student-v-school-charlotte-school-of-law-sued-by-student-seeking-admissions-for-bankruptcy-proceeding/

But what I’ve got to say goes back to just that, we’re for ALL STUDENT DEBTORS not just law students and stories like this distract from the message I hope we’re helping to convey which is that we are witnessing a fundamental paradigm shift in what used to be unassailable advice for young people, particularly women and minorities, which was EDUCATE. 

Now we all know I love Elie Mystal.  I read the blog because of him.  And I’m not saying he shouldn’ t have written this story, but what I am saying is that stories like this are really bad for our message.  Here we have a kid with a record and a clinically diagnosed mental illness who went to an unaccredited law school and never had any hope of becoming a lawyer (or with the aforementioned landing a job at all…I really hope he’s not black).  Now any sensible person reading this can’t begin to sympathize with this guy, any person not familiar with the student debt epidemic would immediately lose all sympathy for student debtors.

Now I want to say some things Benito is too nice and humble to say.  Benito is a smart dude.  He’s rocking three degrees all ivy, T-10 or both.  He didn’t fall for “Winnie the Pooh’s Law School” and pay $40k a year to sit in a tree and stare at a honeypot.  It’s not that unaccredited for profit law schools are scams.  It’s not that law schools that are not in the top ten are not worth the money.  It’s that education, particularly graduate education is not worth its cost.  It is not worth its cost because it is a statistically poor investment and educating the next generation of citizens, professionals and scholars is simply not a goal shared by institutions (large, small, elite or obscure) their faculty, and the parents, banks and trustees that fund them.  That is a mindblowing statement particularly when you consider the nationalistic approach other nations have towards education and the superior students they produce.

That is also why we call this blog “Debtor’s Prison.”  It’s more than just a throwback to a British-Early American practice of locking up people who owe small sums of money.  Primarily what we are saying is that getting a higher education is alot like going to prison.  You lose years of your life in a high-stress environment with nothing to show for it when you get out at which time alot of sinister people/organizations are breathing down your neck for you to pay them money you owe which of course you don’t have…that and your experience actually disqualifies you for a vast number of positions you would otherwise apply for and probably get. 

So in conclusion, you can think of Benito as a tree and Kenneth (the idiot from the story I linked to) as a stump.  The forest is our failure as a nation to utilize our most precious resource, namely young Americans and the very real possibility that after literally hundreds of years of keeping women and minorities out of the Egyptian Pyramid that is higher education, we might have finally gotten in only to find that its been looted by grave robbers.  This would bring us full circle to having our lot in life primarily determined by that of our parents (if we even have living involved parents at all) and that friends is the end of the American Dream as we know it.